Alex Singleton

Yesterday give a speech and was part of a panel for students of the University of Cambridge’s postgraduate certificate in sustainable business. I spoke on the how global business and globalisation not only creates greater wealth but also goes hand in hand with cleaner environments (after the very early stages of development). I explained that […]

Globalisation’s effect on promoting social progress is significant, and an article in The Wall Street Journal this week reinforces it. The article says:
For thousands of years, advancement in India has been restricted by its caste system, which is enshrined in the country’s dominant Hindu religion. While Brahmins, the highest caste, are said to stem from […]

One of the worries people have about globalisation is that all the jobs will end up where the labour is cheapest, leaving workers in already-rich countries out of work. Empirically, this is not the case. There are more jobs today in Europe and in United States than ever before. Sunday’s issue of The Observer gives […]

President Sarkozy is a curious hybrid. On some issues he is a free-marketeer, for example by advocating the loosening the 35-hour working week. But then he descends into protectionism when it comes to major French companies. For example, as Finance Minister, in 2004 he blocked train builder Alstom from being bought by Germany’s Siemens. German […]

A European Parliament committee this week recommended postponing the deadline for full liberalisation of the letter-delivery market until at least 2011, maybe 2013. That’s good news for monopolies like France’s La Poste but bad news for customers. According to The Wall Street Journal: “In the 10 members of the EU-15 that haven’t completed or planned […]

At a Downing Street reception I asked chancellor Gordon Brown about Adam Smith’s principles of taxation. There are four of them: people should contribute in proportion to their abilities; taxes should be transparent; payment should be convenient; and taxes should be ones that are cheap to collect, without needing huge armies of collectors or inspectors, […]

An article this week in The Wall Street Journal by Dan Mitchell discusses the Baltic Tiger that is Estonia. In the last six years, it has enjoyed average growth of 9% a year, having dumped a high tax agenda it initially pursued after independence from the USSR. Mitchell writes:
Seeking a new approach to jump-start its […]

One of the most common urges of politicians is to try and making things neater. They like to tidy things that individuals and the markets in which they operate would, left to their own devices, allow to carry on in a seemingly haphazard way. One example is the way in which the market traders dubbed […]

Often when I give talks about globalisation, someone from the audience will ask whether the wealth-creation globalisation brings is environmentally sustainable. I say that it is because on most measures the environment in rich countries has been improving, and that over the next fifty years, the link between carbon emissions and economic growth will be […]

There’s a quasi-religious view that Europe’s railways would be better off if they were vertically integrated, with track and train operators combined. But it’s difficult to find any current examples around the world to back up this view.
Only two examples of successful vertically-integrated rail systems seem to be proposed. The first is Amtrak, the American […]